As an administrator you need a secure, scalable, resilient application infrastructure to support the developers building and managing J2EE applications and Service Oriented Architecture services. WebSphere application server, a product from IBM, is optimized to ease administration and improve runtime performance. It helps you run applications and services in a reliable, secure, and high-performance environment to ensure business opportunities are not lost due to application downtime. It's easy to get started and tame this powerful application server when you've got this book to hand. This administration guide will help you provide an innovative, performance-based foundation to build, run, and manage J2EE applications and SOA services, offering the highest level of reliability, security, and scalability. This book will take you through the different methods for installing WebSphere application server and demonstrate how to configure and prepare WebSphere resources for your application deployments. During configuration you will be shown how to administer your WebSphere server standalone or using the new administrative agent, which provides the ability to administer multiple installations of WebSphere application server using one single administration console. WebSphere security is covered in detail showing the various methods of implanting federated user and group repositories. The facets of data-aware and message-aware applications are explained and demonstrated giving the reader real-world examples of manual and automated deployments. Key administration features and tools are introduced, which will help a WebSphere administrator manage and tune their WebSphere implementation and application for success.